Limerick brothers’ Stripe online payment company to be rolled out in Ireland first

Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison founders of the online payment system Stripe
Photo by: Forbes

Stripe, a new payment platform developed by Limerick Collison brothers, will debut in Ireland before continuing to the rest of Europe. The executives were in Dublin last week and made their announcement at a Wayra event organized by Telefonica.

Stripe is an online payments engine that simplifies purchasing goods on websites. It was developed by brothers Patrick (23) and John Collison (21) who were recently listed in Forbes top 30 under 30 people in tech. Stripe makes it easy to purchase goods on web, mobile, desktop or tablet. Stripe makes online payments easier for companies like Lyft, Exec, Postmates, Sidecar, Sesame and OrderAhead, who are all already availing of the service.

Stripe’s website says, “We believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, and we want to help put more websites in business.” It continues, “Complexity and opacity have traditionally been hallmarks of online payment processing. We want to fix that.”

Stripe received $2 million in funding in March 2011 by investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreesen Horowitz. In February of 2012, Stripe received another $18 million in funding by Sequia Capital. At that time Sequia Capital valued the company at $100 million.

In 2007 the Collison brothers formed a start-up company called Shuppa, which later became Auctomatic and was funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Y Combinator. Canadian firm Live Current Media acquired Auctomatic in 2008 for $5 million when the Collison brothers were 19 and 17 respectively. John started building websites when he was fourteen and was studying physics at Harvard before discontinuing his studies to work on Stripe full time. Patrick studied math at MIT.